Friday, March 11, 2016

Against Closure

In her terrific essay "On Not Liking Sex," writer Nancy Mairs revisits an old essay she thought she'd finished, titled "On Not Liking Sex," and discovers that her earlier attitudes were sorely lacking. Near the end of the new piece she brings a skeptic's eye to narrative resolution, admitting that she craves it, but also recognizing its essential artificial demand: no more development. A hard thing to reign in, development, least of all of the personal sort. Life's just too messy:

I love closure. Especially in any kind of writing. l like to lie off the tale with some statement that sounds as though nothing further can he said. Never mind the Princess's hysterical weeping on the morning after her wedding night, her later infidelities, the first son's cleft palate, the Prince's untimely death during an ill-advised raid on a neighboring kingdom, the old King's driveling madness: They lived happily ever after, or, if the tale is a modern one like mine, unhappily ever after. But their development ceased.

When does an essay end? she's also asking, and Why there? The sneaking, and sinking, suspicion I have when I read Mairs's essay is that there really are no endings to essays, only pauses—for deadline, dejection, frustration, faux triumph, boredom. Life demands that we turn elsewhere, finally, and that's a good thing. But eventually we depress the pause button and resume, usually fooling ourselves into believing that that last period had been the ending of something, when it might've been the beginning. As I've said elsewhere, writing an essay can feel like building a house without advance blueprints: rooms keep popping up; doors multiply; acreage expands; basements deepen; attics soar. If we don't stop at some point, the whole structure will come crashing down of its own indulgent weight. That's a good enough place to stop as any, I guess.

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Author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing (forthcoming), Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), Conversations With Greil Marcus, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. ✸✸ Music Columnist for The Normal School. ✸✸ Five-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. ✸✸ Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

MY BOOKS

“The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.” Los Angeles Review of Books

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches